This year is set to be an exciting one for marketing – with rapid advances in automation and AI, a new era of privacy, a cookieless internet, and the economic consequences of a worldwide recession against the backdrop of conflict in Europe. While these trends may seem daunting, they also present unique opportunities for businesses willing to adapt and innovate, explains Julio Taylor, CEO of strategic digital marketing agency Hallam, who recently spoke about this topic live at TLR Coworking.
Recently, my wife was in the market for a new bunk bed for our children. Her process was something like this: researching on her phone, then her laptop, then watching a YouTube video, then reading a Reddit review… and then she saw an advert for another bed and started looking up reviews for that one.
A lot of marketers think that the buying process is a linear one. There’s this neat little funnel, and shoppers are supposed to go through these stages.
They like to think buyers become aware of a product, then consider the product, then they convert and buy the product… and stay loyal forever.
This marketing funnel is total crap. This is how people buy products: they go back and forth a million times. They conduct searches, watch YouTube videos, read Reddit reviews… just like my wife did.
So how can a marketing manager or CMO prove the sale of that bunk bed came from that ad, and that ad alone? They can’t. It can’t be done.
Here is what can be done.
Core Principles: The Attention Economy
Consider this – every single marketing strategy, advert, app, post, tweet, Netflix show, music track, everything… is competing for your attention. Everything that is on your device, everything you could possibly look at, is competing for your attention. Your attention is limited and every single marketer is fighting for it – right now.
To put that into context – the average consumer spends 82 hours a week consuming information. That’s close to 100% of waking hours. We spend effectively all our time consuming content of some sort. An ad… an Instagram post… a bus goes by and there’s something on it.
We are averaging around 30k uploads per hour to YouTube, and 100 million Instagram posts per day. There is more content on Earth than there are people to consume it.
This makes the human attention span the world’s most precious resource. More precious than gold. It doesn’t matter what you’re trying to sell – it relies on human attention.
Core Principles: Two Speed Marketing
Marketing works in two fundamental ways. The first is brand marketing. Nike are the masters of brand marketing. I could show you an ad and I wouldn’t have to tell you it’s Nike for you to know it’s Nike. And the point of brand marketing is to deliver long-term growth and long-term memory recall and to get you to associate a brand with something. If you were to put a price or a product on that ad, you’d probably ruin it.
Brand marketing delivers long-term growth, but it’s rarely going to get you to run to a shop and buy something.
Next comes performance marketing. It delivers quick, direct results… but doesn’t deliver long-term growth. If I take the sticker off the window, the sale is over.
Marketing works best when you do both brand marketing and performance marketing at the same time because here’s the thing: 95% of your customers are not in-market right now for your product.
Core Principles: The Privacy Tipping Point
Digital marketing is about to go through a seismic trend, driven by the death of cookies – small files used to monitor what you do on the Internet.
With cookies, marketers know what you want before you even want it. It’s because they’ve been tracking you. That’s illegal now, and so cookies are going away very, very soon.
This marks a change in consumer behaviour. People these days expect brands to take their privacy seriously. And the EU, among others, have stepped in and enacted privacy legislation that forces brands to change how they deal with data.
Some marketers are very sad about this change, because it takes away the superpower of digital marketing – that you can target anyone you want, whenever you want, with no controls.
But the truth is that we’ve become addicted to the sugar hits of short-term success – the ability to launch a targeted Facebook ad and then sales, or impressions, just magically happen.
That is bad because it’s become almost like an economy of shortcuts that bypasses what marketing is actually about – connecting with humans and getting somebody to actually WANT your product, not just buy it because they’re sick of seeing ads for it.
The privacy tipping point amplifies the value of human attention because it’s going to be more difficult to identify users that are in the market for your product.
Let’s say someone wants to launch a second hand car company, and he wants to find everyone in his area who is buying a car right now. You can’t do that on Facebook anymore. You can’t say: “Show me everybody who has searched ‘used car’ in the last two weeks. So, how does this guy launch his company? Well, he could try building a company that people would actually want to buy a car from, rather than invade people’s privacy with targeted adverts.
Core Principles: Creativity is effectiveness
We are now in, what I call, The Age of Persuasion. If we live in a world where the attention span of humans is a currency… and it’s very difficult to get in front of the right people because we can’t target them anymore… and people are busier than ever… then it means the way that marketers can get in front of customers is to persuade them their product is worth buying.
They can do that by advertising based on desire.
So it’s not enough anymore to just describe the functional benefits of a product or service – you need to find a reason to be loved, not just found.
The brain feels before it thinks. The limbic part of the brain is responsible for subconscious emotions. If someone says something terrible, your brain will react before you can consciously react. Same thing with love and hate and all these things. Advertising, and specifically visual advertising, talks directly to the limbic system – which is 60,000 times faster than the conscious brain.
Nike is one of the masters of modern advertising, and they do it by creating a sense, a feeling. It’s designed to trigger a desire or an emotional response that goes beyond what you’re wearing on your feet. They never talk about shoes. Have you ever heard Nike talk about shoes? Is Nike a shoe company? No. Nike is a brand.
Advertising that has the best emotional response has a higher sales lift than advertising that has a poor emotional response. And the quality of the ad multiplies the effectiveness of the budget.
Core Principles: The age of automation
I conducted a little experiment. I asked AI to generate some images. Most of them turned out fine, but then I asked for a picture of Málaga FC holding the Champions League trophy – and it couldn’t do it.
Then I asked it to give me a marketing positioning statement for The Living Room, an international coworking space in Málaga. And it gave me garbage.
“Come to The Living Room in Málaga where you can collaborate and grow your business in a vibrant, modern workspace.”
I asked for a brand statement, and it was boring. It doesn’t understand that The Living Room has Ben, and it has events with free beer, and it has amazing members, and it’s in Soho… and it doesn’t know about the things that make The Living Room truly special. Only a person who knows those things, knows those things.
It’s the difference between calling it cow juice in a cup, and ice cream. Functionally, they are the same thing, but it doesn’t feel the same.
So, with AI, what we’ll have in the future is a world of clones where all the copy is the same and everything is the same. The internet will be full of bad quality, uninspiring content generated by AI – unless a human element overrides the basic vanilla computer generated nonsense we’re likely to see for the next few years.
TLR Family coworking members in attendance at Julio’s recent talk about marketing trends in 2023. Pic: Agnès des Bois.
Marketing Trends – Bringing it all together
Let’s go back to the bunk bed. We talked about the fact that 95% of our customers are passive – they’re not in the market for your product. The first thing we need to do is to create exposure. Maximum exposure in the relevant places. It seems obvious, but what needs to happen is you need to look for every single opportunity to influence the potential buyer and then, when the time comes for them to purchase, you’re in the conversation. Maximising the exposure of your brand to the 95% of people not currently in the market for your product is the most important way of making sure your business grows.
You should also identify your golden thread, and make sure it’s in every piece of marketing you create.
Nike is telling you that you can be an athlete, that you can do it, you just need to find your greatness. They’re not telling you what the shoes are made of, where they’re made, how they’re made. They’re telling you that you can do it.
The golden thread for Lidl is that you come to a supermarket and there’s no nonsense. There’s no music, they don’t say hello, they don’t even give you bags. But it’s really cheap. The golden thread is no nonsense.
You also need to make sure it is easy to buy the product. Tesla is amazing at this. You can just go online and pay €100 and your car is reserved for purchase. You don’t have to actually go to the dealership like with other car companies.
So, ultimately, all this stuff automation can do… we should embrace it. But it’s not marketing. It’s admin.
What happened when technological advances killed the typesetting profession? Millions of people became online graphic designers, UX designers, and animators. Electronic music did not kill the guitar. It simply created new things.
Julio at the end of his amazing TLR talk about human-first marketing. Pic: Agnès des Bois.
Yes, AI will replace some marketing tasks, but marketing is about connecting with a human and making that human either want your product or desire what you have to say.
In order for something to be worth buying, it has to be functional, reliable, and useful. And where marketing comes in, is focussing on what’s memorable and meaningful about the product. That’s what we mean by human marketing. Everything else is admin.
About Julio
Julio, who has been a TLR Family member since September 2021, is the CEO of Hallam, a strategic digital marketing agency.
Julio provides strategic leadership across Hallam to develop excellence in full service digital marketing delivery. Formerly Creative Director, he started designing and building websites in the late 90s, hacking together Geocities websites, frames, and table layouts. During the mighty ’00s, Julio also played guitar and vocals for Illuminatus, Nottingham’s alternative rock anti-heroes.
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